Category — thinking

Design should be mastered as a liberal art before it is considered as a business tool. Great design comes from an artistic or cultural impulse, not from a focus group. Great design starts by creating meaningful stories with a POV, not by building a bulletproof business case. Great design creates new culture, not just clever new utilities. Great Design is about meaning first, the market second.

Scott Klinker in Design vs Innovation, The Cranbook / IIT Debate (via Bruce Sterling)

As I write this, Bruce Sterling is doing his 10th “State of the World” thing at The Well. The conversation is scheduled to last for two weeks, and is viewable by non-members.

It has just started, but looks promising.

http://budurl.com/sterlingworld

Update: Some selected quotes and comments on the ongoing conversation are accumulating on the FriendFeed entry associated with this post. Add your own!

The present versions of ourselves are invariably the biggest idiots, and six months will make that clear

Only Collect « a historian’s craft (via kottke)

By the way, is "slippery slope" considered a thought? I mean do people still think of that as an argument: "once you start down, the only option is complete loss of balance until you hit the bottom?" To me that seems more like an escape from the necessity of having to think about something, but maybe shouting "slippery slope" at a problem still sounds like a thought to some folks. If so, it's kind of sad, no?

Jay Rosen in a FriendFeed comment on his own tweet I’m glad Dave Winer got to hear the Berkeley J-School crowd explain to him that listening too well to the users is unethical

A thoughtful contribution to the personal vs professional blogging discussion:

The point is not to show up on a list, the point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking. That's the work of an author, and I think rather than kissing author blogs goodbye, someone should just start a new list.

Seth’s Blog: Death of the personal blog?

I’ve been spending too much time in the wrong part of the net. I need your help to get out.

In the dark corners of the early-adopter tech-savvy social-media-oriented (un)professional blogosphere, one can drown in posts about microblogging, personal branding, lifestreaming, blog monetization and twitter-vs-friendfeed. My special (un)favorite is the “N tips to make the most of <buzzword>” category.

One hopes that modern websites are usable enough that we don’t need a constant stream of tips and tricks to learn to use them. And if they aren’t, well then they don’t deserve to be used. Besides, don’t these people know that the worst you can do around new technology is to read a handbook?

So please help me out: recommend a nice site (or two) to read that won’t bombard me with such handicapping content. All interesting topics welcome. The comment box is open.

Thank you very much in advance.

[post title shamelessly stolen from one of my parents' fridge magnets; i spend time out of the net, too!]

Ed Boyden, who leads the Synthetic Neurobiology research group of the MIT Media Lab, suggests 10 ways to think better. A sample:

Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read, even when you're reading what you conceive to be introductory stuff. That way, you will always aim towards understanding things at a resolution fine enough for you to be creative.

Technology Review: Blogs: Ed Boyden’s blog: How to Think

Catching up with long-overdue feed items I come across a reference to Clive Thompson’s musings on sci-fi as the last last bastion of philosophical writing. Thompson writes:

If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.

[...]

Its authors rewrite one or two basic rules about society and then examine how humanity responds — so we can learn more about ourselves. How would love change if we lived to be 500? If you could travel back in time and revise decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?

Serendipitously, a later post on the same blog points to an amusing visualization of books preferred at certain US colleges, correlated with the average SAT scores from those universities. Booksthatmakeyoudumb offers a conveniently genre-sorted chart which shows Philosophy as the genre correlated with the highest SATs; following as a close second is, yes, you guessed right, science fiction.

Ender’s game beats Anna Karenina. Tolstoy is surely the better writer, but Scott Card gave us the most food for thought.

Photo of Steve Jobs at home in 1982, by Diana Walker.

From the caption: “This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.” —Steve Jobs

Really tells you something about him, doesn’t it?

There are some other interesting photos of well-known faces by Diana Walker in the The Bigger Picture gallery.

(found via Jose’s tumbleblog)

Go read Seth Godin’s excellent Just one post note.

Seth is right: you have at least one post in you. And not just a blog post: I bet you also have at least one contribution to make in many other fields. So just go and implement it. Why not?

The Online Photographer: Feet Are Optional:

What these straight-A kids wanted was for me to set the terms of their success for them. They wanted me to set up the hoop so they could jump through it for me. They wanted to be told how they could be certain of success. It was what they encountered everywhere else. But what I wanted was for them to set up their own hoop, or, better yet, look askance at the hoop and go, “Nah, not today,” and wander off somewhere and see what they could find. The fact is, you need to fail a lot if you want to succeed as an artist. That’s why the kids who were used to failing weren’t fazed by my classes: they weren’t threatened by the idea of falling flat on their faces 90% of the time. The good students definitely were.

I would go further: you need to fail a lot if you want to succeed. Not just as an artist.

danah boyd has a great post, Growing up in a culture of fear: from Columbine to banning of MySpace, where she shares some interesting thoughts (and experiences) about the difficulties of growing up over-protected. Here’s a snippet:

The wealthy kids in our society are so protected, pampered. When given an ounce of freedom, they go from one extreme to the other instead of having healthy exploratory developments. Many of the most unstable, neurotic and addicted humans i have met in this lifetime come from a position of privilege and protectionism. That cannot be good.

Now go read the whole thing.

Catching up with last week’s Carnival of the Capitalists I came across a nice post from Rosa Say, Start a List: “What I Want to Learn”, where she suggests:

Just write down all the intriguing ideas coming your way this month, and something will start to emerge as your first pick before you know it.

This is exactly what happened (is happening) with this blog, as I explained in a previous post. It is amazing how difficult it can be to ‘think’ about what are we interested in, what do we want, who we are, and how easy it is to find the answers to these questions if we just observe carfelly the patterns that emerge from our actions.

Some weeks ago, Random Thoughts from a CTO wrote that

Regardless of which type of blog you promote, one thing is for sure — “You need to find your voice” and stay true to it.

Identity is certainly a fundamental ingredient to make a project successful. It doesn’t matter if the project is your personal blog, or some bigger task where a whole team is involved. People need to know the values, motivations and goals of the project, so that they can find how they connect to the project, how do they fit in it.

But do we ‘decide’ on the identity beforehand, when the project starts, or does it emerge organically over time? For business-style projects, I would suppose that the identity is something clear from the beginning, as they start with clear goals and motivations. But for more personal-style or experimental projects, such as blogs, the identity might not be defined long after the project started.

When I bought this domain and put up this page, it wasn’t even a blog. But I gradually realized that something blog-like is what I really wanted, and timidly started to experiment with the medium. I started with some short posts on random issues, trying out what worked best for me, what felt more comfortable, more fun. Slowly, some main subjects started to emerge: current events, IT, books I read… Later, some six months into my ‘blogging career’, I realized that the CMS I was using (Pivot) was inadequate, and migrated to what I perceived as a better one (Wordpress). Later still, I started looking for a tag line that would somehow convey what are the main subjects of this blog. Along the way, the design of the site changed quite a few times. And finally, after a bit more than a year, I have a clearer idea about the identity of this blog. But it is definitely nothing that I consciously planned.

But of course, this is just my personal case. Clearly, many blogs are created with a clear identity in mind, and state it clearly in their titles, tag lines and posts from day one.

Reading Frans Johansson’s The Medici Effect I have come across an interesting explanation of the origin of the meme concept.

Apparently, meme was coined by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, in his book The Selfish Gene, published in 1976. Johansson explains that Dawkins described ideas as capable to evolve and spread, just like genes. Dawkins called these ‘propagating ideas’ memes, and he wrote about them (as quoted by Johansson):

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm and eggs, so do memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

Johansson goes on to point out that “Ideas, or memes, compete, in a real sense, for space in our minds. Some memes persist and transform, others die out; the process is similar to that of genetic evolution”.

I find this a wonderful idea: ideas as genes, propagating like a mutation! The best idea reaches the most people, becomes ingrained in our collective mind. And of course, the blogosphere, with most of its inhabitants being compulsive linkers as myself, is the best milieu for rapid spreading/imitation of the coolest ideas.

And that was just the fifth page of the first chapter of The Medici Effect. This book reads promising!

Inspriringly, Don Blohowiak writes:

What is the leadership lesson? Simply this. People have an irrepressible need to apply themselves. To give expression to their innate capabilities. To use their minds and talents no matter their circumstances.

More at Leadership. Now. – Innate motivation.

Fer has come up with a new “inspiring quotes” meme to follow the pass-around book and musical memes that have raged through the blogosphere the last couple of weeks. Although I had successfully avoided the two previous memes, this one is flying directly my way, so I will oblige and squeeze my brain for something inspiring to share with you crazy people that stop to read my ramblings.

So here it comes.

Meme received from: Fer. (Ha! I got a first-generation meme! )

Five inspiring quotes that I keep handy:

1. “Winners never quit. Quitters never win.” from… ehem… a Snickers advertisement…
2. “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (this doesn’t apply only to women, of course)
3. “Always make new mistakes!” from Esther Dyson
4. “You make your own (good) luck” from popular wisdom and many other sources
5. “DON’T PANIC!”, you know from where…

Five people that I send this to:

1. Andreas, who surely needs a blog-post subject which will make it difficult to find a suitable illustrating picture.
2. Chema, who surely has the most action-inspiring quotes.
3. Julio, who surely will take this as an excellent excuse to step up posting frequency.
4. Tatus, who surely has more than five quotes to share.
5. La petite Marta, who surely has the juiciest ones.

Mychael Hyatt @ Working Smart: Sometimes Life Is Like Skiing:
“I’ve especially missed blogging during the last thirty days. I find that blogging makes me slow down just enough to process what is happening around me and in me. It helps me clarify my thoughts and keeps me focused.”

Mychael Hyatt at Working Smart writes about Recovering the Lost Art of Note-Taking. I also use note-taking mostly as a way of staying focused, but I am lacking some sort of the note-organizing techniques he mentions:

• Use symbols so you can quickly scan your notes later.
• Schedule time to review your notes.

Bert Webb follows with some more suggestions on Power Note-Taking that include using codes and keywords for follow-up. Bert’s angle is quite different, as he uses a PDA, while Michael uses a Moleskine journal.